The present invention provides a system for enabling semi-automatic or automatic responses to various types of electronic queries posed in the form of a coded digital signal. As used herein the term “automatic” means without human intervention and the term “semi-automatic” means upon a simple enabling action by a human user.
A large number of commercial and public enterprises may find desirable to elicit responses to queries that can be reduced through standardization to brief digital messages. However, the prototypical application for this capability is in the area of “interactive broadcast advertising”, which can be described as follows.
Advertisement on broadcast media is a well established process. As used herein, the term “broadcast” shall include radio and television using electromagnetic radiation, cable, and/or fiber optic transport as transmission media, and intended for reception by a large audience. Typically, advertisers pay a fee for their advertisements to be broadcast in the hope that listeners/viewers will take certain actions, such as the purchase of a product, to the benefit of the advertiser. It is a well established principle within the advertising industry that the effectiveness of a broadcast advertisement (i.e. the percentage of listeners/viewers that subsequently take the desired action) would be substantially improved if a way existed for such action to be taken, or at least initiated, as an immediate and simple response by the listener/viewer. A system that includes such response means is generally referred to within the broadcast and advertising industries as “interactive broadcast advertising”.
Various methods have been proposed to enable interactive broadcast advertising with limited success. For example, experiments have been conducted within cable television systems wherein the cable transmission system includes a channel in the “uplink” direction to be used for viewer responses. These responses are further enabled by a special electronic apparatus associated with the viewer's cable connection, which apparatus provides simple means to allow the viewer to indicate a response to a prompt included in received television content, and further provides means to relate the response to that prompt, and further provides means to digitally convey the identification of the prompt and the viewer response on the uplink cable channel. This prior art method is deficient in that it requires costly changes to the cable television network and deployment of specialized response devices in the viewers' premises, and that it is restricted in application to cable television advertising, to the exclusion of other forms of broadcast advertising.
Based upon performance and user acceptance of previously proposed methods for enabling interactive broadcast advertisement, it is generally accepted that an improved method would need to be universally adaptable to all forms of broadcast advertising, would utilize infrastructure already in place, and would require only those enabling devices already in widespread use.
Wireless telephone networks are now well established in most countries of the world. Furthermore, in most industrialized countries a significant percentage of the population possesses a compatible wireless device, typically a wireless telephone handset or cellular telephone, herein collectively called a Wireless Telephone Handset. In recent years, this already significant percentage, generally referred to as “penetration rate” has been growing steadily, to the point that individual access to a Wireless Telephone Handset may be considered to be generally ubiquitous, either presently or in the foreseeable future. Recently, many operators of wireless telephone networks have equipped their networks with various means for conveyance of short data messages to and from suitably enabled wireless telephone handsets. Many of the wireless telephone handsets in use today are so enabled, and this percentage can be expected to grow rapidly as users frequently replace their handsets with upgraded models to take advantage of new features. This short data message capability sets wireless telephone networks apart from conventional wireline networks in which a dial-up connection to a data server must generally be established before data communications can be transported.
The general ubiquity of wireless telephone handsets and the availability of short data message conveyance within wireless networks suggests that such wireless data services would provide an ideal medium for the responses associated with interactive broadcast advertisement.